A WORLD WITHOUT HUGO CHáVEZ

With Tuesday’s death of Venezuelan strongman President Hugo Chávez, the United States government should be breathing a sigh of relief. Chávez, who died from cancer after a series of operations in Cuban hospitals, provided the anti-American, anti-capitalist voice for which Latin America had longed for decades. He also had lots of petrodollars and was willing to share them with his comrades around the region. Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, now in some kind of purgatorial retirement himself, must be in mourning over the death of his protégé, and more importantly, the source of $10 billion annually.

After serving jail time for trying to seize power in 1992 in an attempted coup, Chávez came to power through a democratic election in 1998 with 56 percent of the vote. He was re-elected three times since, created a new “Bolivarian” Constitution that enshrined socialism in his country, survived a recall election and a coup attempt and had managed to control Venezuela even though he could not attend his last inauguration as he was in Cuba for more cancer treatment.

Chávez will be remembered for providing an alternative to the Washington consensus, the policies of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and U.S. Treasury Department, and for nationalizing many important industries in Venezuela, effectively placing the state at the center of the economy. He nationalized much of the private sector. Taking a page out of the populism playbook, Chávez also gave his people consumer goods like refrigerators and big-screen televisions. He paid for Cuban eye doctors to do surgery in Venezuela and around the region. He is alleged to have funded presidential election campaigns of Rafael Correa of Ecuador, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner of Argentina, Evo Morales of Bolivia, Humala Ollanta of Peru and Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua. He even gave subsidized heating oil to the poor, many black and Hispanic, on the U.S. eastern seaboard through Joseph P. Kennedy II’s nonprofit organization. President Chávez was a modern-day Latin American Robin Hood.

He understood the mass media and its power. Chávez hosted a weekly talk show, lasting five hours, making sudden policy announcements, firing ministers in his government and entertaining audiences with songs, jokes and long rants against the United States. Broadcast on radio and television, it was the epitome of the cult of the personality, long a feature in Latin American governance. The strongman, or el caudillo, rules – in this case through the mass media, not just through clientelism and political patronage. He founded Telesur, a transnational television network that further expanded his influence. Chávez also understood that democracy in the United States would help provide some useful idiots to do his bidding stateside – sycophants like Oliver Stone and Sean Penn fit the bill.

While he called President George W. Bush “Mr. Danger,” it was Chávez who embarked with military adventurism, albeit often in his own country. He was a great client for weapons merchants, buying Spanish submarines for his Navy and Russian AK-47’s for his civil militia to ward off a perceived U.S. invasion. In 2008, he sent troops and tanks to the Colombian border after that country’s troops attacked a military base inside Ecuador belonging to the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (or FARC), the leftist guerrilla group engaged in a decades-long civil war. Chávez’s largesse included money, logistics and a vast secret service network. He provided assistance to terrorist groups like Hezbollah and the IRA. He courted dictators from Belarus to Syria, Iran to Nicaragua, and was always opening factories and announcing new deals with Chinese and Iranian officials.